Roman History (Historia Romana)

By avoiding the charge of being overly concise, or by attempting to justify himself through the gravity and utility of the subjects he examines (I. 16, II. 38), the greatness of the persons involved (II. 41), or the impetus of a deeply moved spirit (II. 66), he endeavors to purge himself of blame. Indeed, Velleius undoubtedly proposed in his lost preface this very plan—to briefly compress so many great events performed by both barbarians and Romans down to his own memory—just as Sulpicius Severus, a Christian author whom everyone easily recognizes as an emulator of our author not only in the form of his work but also in the number of his books, did in his own preface. Nor does it seem far from the truth that Velleius, like Sulpicius, yielded to the urgent requests of many who were eager to learn of world events through concise reading—perhaps even at the request of Vinicius himself, a most serious man, as we conjectured above in Prolegomena Chapter 1. He certainly indulged his own century, which was corrupted by softness and a flight from the labor of extracting historical memory from the voluminous works of earlier historians, by providing a shorter and more concise path to lead his contemporaries to the most noteworthy events.

But Velleius did not wish to produce thin and meager annals, the only praise of which is brevity, nor did he wish to condense the work of some previous historian—as Marcus Brutus had done before him in the work of Coelius Antipater, according to Cicero’s Letters to Atticus (XIII. 8). Rather, it pleased him to present a view of the most expansive and serious matters, contracted into two small books (for so it pleased him: see I. 14), and to set them forth—clear, effective, and most welcome to his readers, who were certainly Roman and not unlearned—crafted with almost oratorical skill, as if upon a precise tablet, together with a clear distinction of times.

Since both the genre of brief narration and the oratorical method of presentation depend as much upon the selection and treatment of material as upon elocution and diction, we must look at both; and first, how Velleius, in striving for brevity, played the parts of both historian and orator in selecting and treating his subject matter.

The selection of material is twofold: it concerns not only the primary headings of universal history, but also individual events, or the parts by which those events are contained and explained.